Ceramic tiles are one of the major materials used for flooring and wall coverings. The raw materials used to form tiles comprise clay minerals, feldspar and chemical additives required for the shaping process. One common method to produce ceramic tiles uses the following production steps. The raw materials are milled into powder and mixed.
Sometimes, water is then added and the ingredients are wet milled. The water is removed using filter pressing followed by spray drying into powder form. The resulting powder is then dry pressed under a very high pressure (about 400 bars) to a tile body with a thickness of 3-10 mm. The tile body is further dried to remove remaining moisture and to stabilize the tile body to a solid homogenous material. One or several layers of glaze, which is a glass like substance, are applied on the tile body by dry or wet methods. The purpose of tile glazing is to protect the tile. The glaze is available in many different colours and designs. Some glazes may create different textures. The tile is after glazing fired in a furnace or kiln at very high temperatures (1.300° C.). During firing, the glaze particles melt into each other and form a wear resistant layer.
New dry methods have been introduced recently and a tile may be formed by scattering, pressing and firing in a continuous production line with a total production time of about one hour. Large tile blanks may be formed that after firing are divided into individual tiles by for example laser cutting. This new production technology provides improved strengths, flexibility and size tolerances.
Roller screens are often used to create a decorative pattern. The contact nature of the rotary screen-printing has many disadvantages such as breakages and long set-up times. Several tile producers have therefore recently replaced this conventional printing technology with digital ink jet printing technology that offers several advantages mainly related to production flexibility and costs
Tiles are generally installed side by side on a surface such as a floor or wall. An adhesive compound is used as a base. After connection to the sub floor or a wall a grout is spread over and between the tiles to further bind the tiles and to fill spaces between adjacent tiles.
The major advantage of a tile-based floor is that the tiles are moister proof and they do not swell and shrink in changed humidity as other floors, for example laminate and wood floors.
Tile floors have several disadvantages compared to laminate and wood floors. One major disadvantage is that conventional tiles have significant dimensional variances in length, width and thickness. However, such production variances are decreasing continuously when new and advanced production methods based on dry forming are introduced and combined with edge trimming. Another major disadvantage is that installation of tiles is labour intensive. Ceramic tiles are very brittle and they break without significant deformation. They must be installed on rather rigid sub floors and the adhesive compound layer may break if the sub floor expands and shrinks. Rather costly and moisture stable sub floor must be used such as cement bonded particleboard and similar.
Floor elements comprising thin stone material are similar to ceramic tiles. They have similar properties and are installed in a similar way.
There is a need for a tile or stone floor and wall system that is simple to install, that may cover large floor areas without expansion joints, that may be easy to disassemble and that may be installed on more cost efficient sub floors that have a higher moisture movement than the ceramic tiles.